When Jeremy Borsos and his wife Sus took on the remediation of the Blue Cabin, we at grunt never expected what eventually came out of it! Using historical materials, they took the structure apart, methodically cleaned every inch, and replaced the rotted out bits. They insulated the walls and fixed the floor. Essentially, they treated it as an archaeological site, collecting its history in bits of newspapers and mouse nests and – in an archival process – painstakingly saved what remained. The humble structure revealed itself slowly over the six-month period of the restoration and culminated, when they took up the floor, in the discovery of almost 40 posters that had been put there in 1927 to prevent the floor from squeaking.

In this exhibition, Jeremy and Sus present a body of work that documents this journey. What he gives us is the history of the cabin before Al Neil and Carole Itter’s tenancy, offering us new insights into the notably unusual life of artists and writers on the foreshore.

Jeremy Borsos attended Emily Carr School of Art and the Art Students League in New York. His practice is multidisciplinary and includes writing, photography, installation, painting and video. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Together with his partner Sus, the Borsos have developed a meta-historical use of salvaged architecture, constructing multiple dwellings and ancillary structures. They live and work on Mayne Island, British Columbia, and in Athens, Greece.

Sus Borsos was born in Denmark and studied statistics and computer sciences at Copenhagen University before managing Scandinavian Stage Design, where she oversaw the creation of stages for major European events. After relocating to Canada in 1992, she worked with her husband, Jeremy Borsos, on constructing their Mayne Island home created from salvaged architectural fragments. They have built subsequent houses using period architectural salvage, and have most recently restored and repurposed The Blue Cabin, the studio component of a floating artist residency. Sus has also worked in digital film editing and design, and image output for reproduction. The Borsos current projects include redesigning and rebuilding a studio and living space in Athens, Greece.

The Blue Cabin project is led by grunt gallery, along with Other Sights for Artists Projects, and Creative Cultural Collaborations (C3).

Representing the last vestiges of a cultural tradition of artists and others living in squatters’ shacks along the foreshores of this region’s waterways, Al Neil and Carole Itter’s Blue Cabin was one of many structures that dotted the shores of Indian Arm.

Recently, the land adjacent to the cabin, MacKenzie Barge and Shipbuilding, was sold to Polygon Homes for redevelopment. Under their agreement with Port Metro, Polygon must remediate the foreshore, including the small cove the Blue Cabin was nestled within. To avoid demolition, the cabin was moved 5 kilometres west to a secure storage lot for repair and remediation.

Along with Other Sights for Artists’ Projects and Creative Cultural Collaborations, grunt gallery has a vision to save the cabin and continue its use as an artist residency on the waterways of the Lower Mainland. The following documents were produced in consultation with a number of stakeholders in the community to aid in planning and solicit support for the Blue Cabin’s future.

BOARD

Karen Kazmer: President

Karen Kazmer, a practising visual artist, works with a diverse range of materials in her sculpture, installations and public art. She received her BFA from UBC and her MFA from York University. She is a part-time instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo shows in Canada and the United States. Recently, a public commission, Moving Up was completed for the new Spirit Trail in North Vancouver.

Jessie Caryl: Vice President

Jessie Caryl is a lawyer whose background is in historical research, writing, and curatorial practice. She has an M.A. in Art History (Critical and Curatorial Studies) (UBC), an Hon. B.A. in Art and Art History (University of Toronto) and a diploma in Fine Art from Sheridan College.

Karlene Harvey: Secretary

Karlene Harvey is an illustrator, artist and writer who lives in Vancouver, BC. She graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2007 with a degree in visual art. She has a passion for creating environments that produce meaningful community engagement. She advocates for capacity development in organizations that foster female leadership. Her career background includes programming and communications for public health, contemporary art administration and more recently, coaching and advising. She is currently an Academic Advisor at the University of British Columbia. Independently, she continues to work on her art practice. She is currently developing a portfolio of writing and illustrations for children’s books. She is Tshilqot’in, Carrier, and Okanagan and has a passion for nation building and indigenous social justice.

Charlene Vickers

Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe artist living and working in Vancouver. Trained as a painter, she graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1994 and attained a BA from Simon Fraser University in Critical Studies of the Arts in 1998. She completed her MFA at Simon Fraser University in 2013. Born in Kenora, Ontario and raised in Toronto, she explores her Ojibway ancestry through painting, sculpture, performance, and video examining memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands.

Fionna Mowatt

Fiona Mowatt is a practising visual artist & arts educator based in Vancouver BC. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art & Design, her first solo exhibition was at the grunt gallery in 1993 and she has been involved with the gallery ever since. As a senior educator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and a former instructor at Arts Umbrella, she has many years of experience developing & teaching curriculum, working collaboratively and conducting public tours & workshops for both youth groups & audiences of all ages.

Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo

Born in El Salvador, Castillo immigrated to Canada in 1989 at the age of 11. He attended the Ontario College of Art and Design (Toronto 1998-2001) and received an MFA from Concordia University (2004-2007). A previous resident of Montreal, Castillo relocated to Vancouver in 2013.

Pongsakorn Yananissorn

Pongsakorn Yananissorn‘s practice investigates and expands on naturalized experiences and unobserved paradoxes in which ideologies are at their most potent. Employing various mediums that correlates to their own socioeconomic and historical specificities his projects often take form in subtle interventions and tongue-in-cheek responses. This engagement applies to both his artistic and curatorial practice. Born in Thailand, he currently lives and works in Vancouver.

Brett Clark

BrettClark relocated permanently to Vancouver from Melbourne, Australia in 2017. An opportunity to work at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s during a working-holiday introduced him to the visual-arts community and shifted his focus to fundraising for non-profits. Now working at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Brett holds an Honours Degree in Music and continues performing with the Vancouver Men’s Chorus and spends his remaining time volunteering for arts organizations and festivals.

CURRENT PROJECTS:

grunt gallery is very excited to be programming content for a new non- commercial urban screen in Mount Pleasant! The urban screen is being constructed on the second floor of the RIZE building on the western side of Kingsway Avenue facing the street. Métis filmmaker, Amanda Strong, is our first artist to produce original work for the screen and there will be a series of community digital storytelling workshops through June for people to contribute to the launch in July 2018.

Pink Noise Pop UpMarch – April 2018A series of events that expands the relationship between the arts communities in Vancouver and Seoul, Pink Noise Pop Up seeks to highlight the ways that art interacts with the often complex social and economic conditions of the city. Based in the work of Canadian arts collective Instant Coffee, this exhibition includes installations, artist editions, performances and other collaborations that will take place in South Korea.

The Blue Cabin
We have a vision to save Al Neil and Carole Itter’s famous blue cabin – which was built in the 1930’s and sat for years as part of a squatter’s community on the Burrard Inlet North Shore – and a plan to convert it into an artist residency.

The Making of An Archive
Summer 2017 – Spring 2018
Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s project, The Making of an Archive, seeks to collect images of everyday life photographed by Canadian immigrants, in a direct, collective and exploratory approach.

Spark: Fireside Artist Talk Series
January 2016 – Present
A series of informal presentations hosted by the Native Education College (NEC) in partnership with grunt gallery. These informal talks feature Indigenous artists whose work spans media from the two-dimensional to live performance and beyond. Their works fuse traditional cultural knowledge with contemporary art forms, pose urgent political questions, and push the boundaries of how we think about art, history and culture more broadly. Join us over the lunch hour to be inspired by these artists in the NEC’s longhouse!

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PAST PROJECTS:

2017

Journey to Kaho’olawe
May 25 – 30, 2017Journey to Kaho’olawe is an artist publication by Hans Winkler and T’uy’t-tanat Cease Wyss. The book is the result of a four year process centred on the Hawaiian Island of Kaho’olawe, a sacred site to the Hawaiians in recovery after being occupied as a practice range by the American military. Returned to the Hawaiians in the 1990s, the island is being remediated and returned to its natural state. In conjunction with the launch of the publication grunt gallery and the artists present a week long series of events celebrating Kaho’olawe and the Kanaka presence in BC.

Spring Fever: Vancouver Independent Archives 2017
March 18 – April 8, 2017
This spring season, Vancouver Independent Archives will offer a series of free public talks, screenings and community workshops that foreground local art and art history by drawing on the archives of Vancouver’s independent arts community. Building on the success of Vancouver Independent Archives Week 2015, Spring Fever invites new partner artists, scholars, and organizations to share their approach toward and practice within the archive.

IntertextualWhat’s At Stake? Intertextual Indigenous Knowledges is an afternoon of talks, panels and a spoken word performance which examines knowledge, power, authority, and sovereignty in the construction of artistic practices. The event follows from Intertextual: Art in Dialogue, a roving reading group that was held at participating galleries over the last year.

2016

Shako Club
A series of workshops in the Tonari Gumi kitchen and studio space around concepts of wellness, care and food where culinary “sculptures” were constructed, incorporating aspects of stories, ideas and wellness philosophies. By artist Cindy Mochizuki and members from Tonari Gumi.

Cutting Copper: Indigenous Resurgent Practice
A collaborative project between grunt gallery and the Belkin Art Gallery, aiming to bring together a cross-disciplinary group of artists, curators, writers, educators, scholars, students, and activists to explore the embodied theory of Indigenous resurgence and cultural representation – both from the perspectives of their own disciplines and one another’s.

FutureLoss
Space, on Main Street and in Vancouver, is currency, and artist Zoe Kreye’s practice reaches through the overarching narratives of real estate, gentrification and speculation to consider the poetics of an individual’s connection to place.

2014

30th Anniversary
Thirty years is a long time. A retrospective of all that is (and was) grunt gallery.

Play, Fall, Rest, Dance
The artist works with children with disabilities to emphasize the state of making and being, the pursuit of uninhibitied creative exploration that is void of rules, structures and concepts of ‘right or wrong’ and ‘perfection vs. mistakes’. Children are enabled with artistic autonomy and the artist thoughtfully guides them to explore their creative processes. By artist Valerie Salez.

gruntCraft
A youth engagement pilot program developed to bridge the creative work being done by youth in the popular online video game Minecraft and artistic inquiry at grunt gallery.

2013

ThisPlace Vancouver
Rethinking ideas about Vancouver’s identity and history, this project attempted to compile a collaborative archive in order to expand the collective awareness of the city’s narratives.

2006

2005 – 2009

Brunt Magazine
Showcasing the artists exhibited at grunt gallery, brunt magazine is a complement to the exhibitions and a closer look at the artists, their processes, and the ideas that inspire their work.